That’s the beginning of a three-page letter written and signed by lawyer Rodrigo Rosenberg on May 9th. “If you are reading this message, it’s because I, Rodrigo Rosenberg Marzano, was assasinated by the private secretary to the President, Gustavo Alejos, and his associate Gregorio Valdez, with the approval of President Alvaro Colom and of (the President’s wife) Sandra De Colom.” (A translation of the full statement is available here.)

The following day, Rosenberg was shot while bicycing in Guatemala City. In the letter – and the accompanying video, above – Rosenberg tells his audience that, if he is killed, it’s because he represented a prominent Lebanese businessman, Khalil Musa, and his daugher Marjorie Musa. The elder Musa had been involved with complex dealings with state-controlled bank, Banrural – he’d been offered a board seat and then later had it withdrawn, and believed his involvement with the bank was being used to assuage concerns that the bank was engaged in corrupt practices, including laundering drug money. Earlier this month, the elder and younger Musa were killed – while the police report that the Musas were killed by workers in one of their factories, Rosenberg believed that they were killed because they threatened to expose government corruption. The Guatemalan government strenuously denies Rosenberg’s posthumous charges.

In one of her posts, Xeni notes that the young people organizing online to protest Rosenberg’s murder are taking a great deal of personal risk. That was a prescient warning on her part – today, Guatemalan police arrested Jean Ramses Anleu Fernández, who was twittering under the handle @jeanfer.

Now #freejeanfer and #jeanfer are joining #escandalogt as popular tags in the Guatemalan twittersphere. Needless to say, I’m setting up scripts to track all these tags and will release data here as it comes in. I’m intrigued to see whether we see pro-Colom voices in the tagstream as well as those protesting against the government, as we did with the #pman tag in Moldova.

Anleu’s arrest is a reminder of the very real dangers associated with online protest in repressive nations. Marc Lynch offered his concerns about Egyptian activists protesting on Facebook in a recent talk in New York – he worried that the ease of organizing online protests would motivate people to confront the Mubarak government without understanding the possible consequences. If the Colom government is willing to kill whistleblowers – which they strenuously deny – and arrest people for twittering in protest, it’s reasonable to assume that online activist carries some real risks in Guatelama. But Guatemalans aren’t running away from the medium – in the past couple of hours, dozens of people have reposted the tweet that led to Anleu’s arrest as a sign of solidarity and as a challenge to authorities.

I ran a little tool I developed a few weeks back to check the frequency with which phrases and hashtags appear on Twitter. #escandalogt isn’t hugely frequent, registering at 0.052% – compared to #swineflu, for instance, which was running at over 2% at the height of hype/hysteria. What’s interesting is that #escandalogt is about as frequent as several of the tags listed on Twitter’s “Trending Topics”, getting more use than #fixreplies, #GoogleFail and #theoffice, all currently featured on the right sidebar. It’ll be interesting to see whether #escandalogt emerges there… or whether this is a sign that those topics aren’t entirely algorithmically generated and some human curation is involved.

Sadly we lack diverse opinions and good investigative journalist in Guatemala to put the situation in an objective perspective.

Many cases are never prosecuted and just now people is starting to realize how harmful a corrupted State is. For example there is a detention order against a high rank officer of the army pending for years, it was never reported by the press: http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/1442/1/

Just now mainstream media and the echo produced by the blogs started to care and created a huge campaign around the murders of important members of the elite.

200,000 people were murdered during the armed conflict, no one cared. Not a single officer was prosecuted. Many bus drivers have been murdered every day in Guatemala, no one cared (they do not have a youtube video but they received death threats before their murders.

The selective activism (not spontaneous at all) of some Guatemalan users of Facebook and Twitter just shows how big the differences among Guatemalans are, how polarized the society is and how visible or invisible can be a crime, a social issue and how important your last name or your bank account is.

The situation with the financial panic and the blogger in prison is a different matter (it is against the constitution and International Conventions), but again, the law itself that allowed the courts to prosecute him was just the result of the lobby of interest groups (the bankers)to protect their business.

So the offline world is talking too, but no one seems to listen to them…

CHRONICLE OF A DEATH FORETOLD
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……Gabriel García Márquez wrote ‘Chronicle of a Death Foretold’ which is an analysis of passion within the Latin American culture.
……When a Latin Americans assumes a presidency of a country, he seems to feel the greased finger of god, and he, also, begins to feel as a loved personal friend with divine rights. Watching Mr. Colom before the cameras, gesturing nervously and backed by his phalange of sweaty rumpled henchmen, the only thing missing were the tattoos and the hand signs; but is all the same thing, these are cholos in neck ties. With the voice cracking under his peculiar speech impediment, he portrayed a frighten mechanical Pinocchio. One can only wonder about his estate of mind, does he think he can make up the truth as he goes along by divine presidential right, or is he truly confused in the belief that at least the very ignorant and stupid should believe in him.
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……The reality is that violence and political assassinations are natural death causes, however, for religious and philosophical conditions the public does not wish to accept it. That is not to say that it should not be avoided. But generally the weaker the government the more they make use of the technique; but, for Latin America, historically the practice became the norm with the Holly Inquisition and it stands, still without qualms. In this remarkable case, Mr. Rosenberg has played a masterful move check mating President Pinocchio and his government by anticipating the eminent end accurately, and by planting the unprecedented political time bomb of all time.
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……Mr. Rosenberg has left the world the ‘Rosenberg Maneuver’ that will be seen employed for evermore. – Corona Agreda